But when my plane touched down here tonight, it all felt like a lifetime ago.

Same five years. How can it feel so different?

You guys should have seen me tonight. Fumbling to purchase a SmarTrip card, trying to figure out which side of the Metro platform to stand on, acting like a total tourist as we transferred from the yellow to the blue line. Oh! oh! and I almost forgot about the time I knocked my suitcase down the up escalator as we exited at Federal Center SW. Nothing but suave. Yes. Suave.

My public transit skills have evaporated, my mental maps have faded, and my sense of where I am in the city is basically gone, gone, gone. I’m no longer the young, metropolitan woman I’d spent six years becoming. Five shorts years — and I’ve completely unbecome.

And also rebecome. A pretty poignant reminder of what time can do.

It’s so interesting to be back here. So exciting. Somehow scary all over again.

And in a few short hours, it’s exhausted me. So. Netflix in the hotel room until this midwestern local yokel ventures back out into the big city for a few days.

"Rachel V. Stankowski considered herself, among other things, a writer. Primarily due to the positive stigmas that accompanied the label, but also because it seemed to excuse some of her more major eccentricities, vanity included."
My brother, also a writer, wrote that about a fictional character. It might have been about me. So I stole it. He's good; maybe I can be too.